A guiness world record day has been planed to mark the official release of Firefox 3. On the day, a record for the most number of downloads for a single software in 24 hours will be attempted.
Spread the word around and help FF achieve this unique feat. Signup and pledge here. Experience the Web in a better way.. Get Firefox!!
Update: Firefox 3 is officially out! http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
India’s first ever Developer summit held recently at IISc, Bangalore, concluded friday night with them giving out developer awards. The event was aptly titled, The Great Indian Developer Summit held between May 19th to 23rd 2008. Yes, it feels great to be recognized as a developer, more so for Indians. FOSS.in, Barcamps and this, I think am becoming a conference junkie.
Saltmarch Media, organized the event. The event was spread over 5 days based on 3 main tracks, for .Net, Web 2.0, and Java. All the talks and workshop sessions were based on the above topics. Who’s who in the respective fields had come over to present the sessions and workshops. I had a chance to interact with Jesse James, popularly called as father of Ajax, or as the person who coined the term ‘Ajax’. Also got a chance to have a picture along with him 🙂
On the final day post the sessions, the action shifted to Palace Grounds, where a first ever Developer Awards were given out. Before the conference started, a online vote was taken for various categories including best IDE, best configuration management tool etc. The list also had a vote on the top committer to open source projects from India. Some of the names included were, Shreyas (Foss.in) and Peter Thomas(Satyam). Eventually Peter Thomas went on to win the award. Among others, Oracle tools, Eclipse, MySQL and Microsoft tools were the potential winners in different categories.
This night also marked the Thirteenth (13) year of Java, a huge cake was cut marking the entry of Java into teenage. The show was well anchored by Divya from Saltmarch with lots of fun activities for the crowd and so on. Rock bands Motherjane (Cochin based) and Bhoomi rocked the crowd with their tracks. Overall a satisfying conference experience, well co-ordinated and executed. Looking more from production team in the near future.
Tags: gdis, developersummit, saltmarch
Searchme is a search engine. Yes, one would guess, oh here’s another one out to change the way one searches the web. But this one does catch your attention. It displays results in visual format and lets you slide through results using a slide bar in the bottom. The visual effects are appealing, which gives you a impression like as if we are flipping through yellow pages. As you type the categories are auto suggested and placed as icons right below your text box as shown below.
As is evident, the whole site is Flash SWF file. The rich look and feel is driven by Flex and is currently under beta stage. It would take them some time to establish themselves, but their crawlers are already on the sprawl to index the web. You can join their development team by applying to jobs@searchme.com .
Watch the demo videos
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/BZSpjXEvy1I&hl=en]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/TsGR5HP2ffw&hl=en]
Tags: searchme, searchengine, flex, flash
For those who are aware of the American Pie movie series, the above line should definitely ring a bell. But here am referring this to the ongoing Barcamp Bangalore 6 at IIMB. Bangalore,www.barcampbangalore.org The 6th summer edition 2008 is scheduled on 19th and 20th April.
The sessions were varied at its best. For geeks, for environmentalists, for social causes everyone had thing or the other to speak and discuss upon. Personally, I could attend sessions on Life Blob, RIA Web development, Kamasutra lessons and Dating sessions.
Started my day with demo of Life Blob. www.lifeblob.com. Life Blob is a social site for individuals and groups to post and track events as blobs. In a individuals life time in everything he has done has been captured as blobs in a timeline. So, if one were to look at a person’s profile, his timeline for a particular year will show all the stuffs he/she has referenced on the web at that particular time. These could the photos uploaded/ blogs or events attended. This startup has a 3 member team, all of them ex-Trilogy members and friends. It took them about 6 months to bring up the site with Ajax/Java/MySQL being the supporting technology behind it and currently with one server supporting the traffic. The site has a slidebar in the bottom to show the time line and facility to import photos from flickr and picassa among other features.
Next there was a 3 hour long session on RIA based web development. It consisted of 4 sub sessions. RIA products from different vendors were discussed. The sessions were, Introduction to RIA, RIA using flex, RIA with OpenLazzlo, RIA using MS Silverlight.
Mrinal gave a background and introduction of RIA. He took us through the complete evolution of software products on how they evolved from dumb terminals to the web 2.0 age. He pointed out the limitations of HTML based static rendering of UI and how RIA caught on due it its visual appeal and ease of development. This was followed by a demo cum introduction to Flex framework. This was done by Harish and Raghu from Adobe. They highlighted the advantages of building desktop like components with flex for the web to experience the RIA. The flex framework itself is a set of librarys on top of the flash, which is opensource. But currently, the IDE they have is licensed. Although there are free alternatives available.
Next on, OpenLazzlo- a open source framework built on top of flash was presented. It was pointed out that the OpenLazzlo apps on the web left lesser footprint when compared to SWFs generated by flex or flash. A full fledged IDE is still not avaliable for OpenLazzlo. Next up, two of the Microsoft members came out to talk on their RIA based framework Silverlight. Silverlight is used for their live search engine. I did not attend the same for obvious reasons!
Towards the end of the day, there were two non-tech sessions that I attended. First was tips from the great book of love – Kamasutra. This carpet session was taken by Shashi. I missed the initial 15 to 20 Mins, which was supposedly the most interesting parts. By the time I joined, he was reading out what the “scriptures” spoke about breaking the ice with the opposite sex. In his interpretation, he suggested all these lessons could be used by guys to create a impression on the girls they want to hit on. Most of his tips were received with loud cheer and applause. Trust me, I had never attended such a discussion! It was very interesting and filled with humour at times and even informative!
Dating session was the last one for the day for me. This was a casual and light open discussion on different dating related experiences. It was mostly directionless. but still the one liners from some of the participants made it worth attending. Most cleaches and stereotypes were discussed and at one point everyone were giving suggestions for a certain individuals problem in life. He somehow wanted to know if he could ever get to speak to a nice girl he knows in another team in his company!!
Overall satisfying day!
Tags: barcamp, bcb6, barcampbangalore6
With most websites you surf these days have some type of video content embedded in them. Be it news sports or entertainment sites. And 9 out of 10 times they are Macromedia Flash Videos (flv). If they are youtube links, there’s a good chance you can download them for future viewing. Otherwise its difficult to get hold of the flv file you are viewing. If you are lucky a simple view source will fetch you the direct link to the .flv file on the site. Even if thats not the case here’s a way to watch the video again, without wasting your bandwidth usage.
If you use Firefox or Flock, you can grab this from the browser Cache stored on your filesystem. On Linux you can find this under your $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<-profileid->/Cache. These files don’t have any extension and will have names like 05520CD8d01 etc. Proceed to this folder and you can watch all the FLVs cached so far using the following command .
ls | xargs -i file {} | grep Video | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1 | xargs -i vlc {} .
The above will directly play those files with vlc player. If you dont have vlc installed replace it with any other player you want to use. IMO, I have found vlc to render flvs better than mplayer or other players due its better audio-video sync capabilities.
Remember to backup the files you are viewing to any other folder. The files under Cache will be expunged once browser is closed.
You can copy all flvs in one shot to your $HOME with the following command.
ls | xargs -i file {} | grep Video | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1 | xargs -i cp {} ~
You can use google for your p2p searches. Use the following search string to look for any media files.
intitle:”index.of” (mp3) titanic -html -php -asp -cf -jsp
mp3 refers to the media you want as in a extension. You can also use other formats in the following fashion (mp3|avi|mpg)
titanic refers to the name of the media file. You can also give long names separated by a “.” eg:- titanic.my.heart will return sites which has My hear will go on. The “.” replaces a space . or a _ like a wild char.
-html -php -asp -cf -jsp indicates that do not list a .html or .php or other pagers.
Watch the video below for detailed explanation.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRv953XZX6Y]
Update: To avoid typing all the “codes” use this site to do the same for u www.g2p.org, useful for doing mp3 searches.
I came across this post http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html regarding a malicious intent behind the creator of g-archiver, a gmail backup program. Apart from doing what it claimed to do, the author John Terry stored and sent a copy of gmail username and password of every user who has ever used this software to his own email account. What a cheat!
Hence spread the word do not use G-Archiver!!
Though i had found this tool long time back, it came about pretty handy while using it recently.
Get it from jUploadr
Just untar the package and run jupload from the installation folder. This launches a simple UI which allows you to drag and drop photos to it. Just add a flickr account and authorize juploadr to upload. You can add individual tags and descriptions to each of your photos. Its purely written in Java and hence portable across platforms.
Update: On ubuntu, there are other flickr upload tools too. Notably good ones are postr and dfo for gnome and kflickr for KDE.
To install simply type sudo apt-get install postr or sudo apt-get install kflickr at the terminal.
Google talk team has come up with a talkback gadget which can be added to your site or blog. This will allow visitors to be able to chat with you on your gtalk account if you are online. With just few lines of html code, you can be now be contacted from anywhere on the web. The interesting catch is that the visitors need not have a gtalk account or even a email address to be able to ping you.
Visit the link to know more. GoogleTalk or to get started login with your google account
Update: I have added this to my blogspot blog and also to my wordpress blog using a trick as suggested in this blog http://daniel.fallenste.in/2008/05/18/howto-google-talk-badge-on-wordpresscom/
Cheers to Innovation @ Google.
P.S Am not too sure if this is a original idea by google, but then what ever google does will have a massive usage and awareness.
You are a developer and spend lot of time on a browser(and its firefox I presume!!). You can’t always open a cricket scorecard site to view the latest scores. This could for two reasons, one you dont want to be disturbed and the other is you dont want to be caught by others doing this while at work 🙂
With CricScores you can view the current cricket scores on your statusbar while continuing with your work. The scores are pulled from cricbuzz.com feed.
Well, I have updated it for firefox 3.* and added it at addons.mozilla.org the link to the install page is here.